Windows Live Green Stamps

I remember my grandma saving up her S&H Green Stamps, sticking them in books and trading in for household items. She would get the stamps as a perk when shopping for groceries and, I believe, from some of five-and-dime stores (Northern Maine was a latecomer to the Wal-Mart era of big retailing and ghost-town main streets).

Windows Live SearchPerks sure sounds similar to me. According to the Web site: "Start earning tickets towards exciting prizes whenever you search the Web—up to 25 tickets per day."

GOT A TIP OR RUMOR?

Grandma could redeem her stamps whenever she had enough for the desired item. You'll have to wait until April 15, 2009, to "choose your prize," according to the SearchPerks Web site. But the FAQ indicates a longer wait: "About three weeks after the SearchPerks promotion" participants "will receive an e-mail with instructions on how to redeem their tickets."

Microsoft offers 500 tickets for signing up (Windows Live ID required) and downloading the, get this, Perk Counter. I don't know why, but the name had me laughing for a couple of minutes. You're going to need those 500 tickets, given the 25-ticket-a-day limit and how many tickets are needed to redeem perks. A 7 by 7-inch journal with pen—in beautiful Zune brown—is 895 tickets. That works out to 16 days of searches, if you use your first 500 tickets. Otherwise: 36 days, baby.

If you redeem 525 tickets—that's the starter tickets plus one day of searching—you can get five songs from Puretracks. The tunes are 192K-bps rights-protected Windows Media Audio files. Hey, how can they be "pure tracks" if they're proprietary WMA? Surely somebody has heard about MSN, Yahoo and Wal-Mart rights-protected music stores being shuttered. Your DRM-protected tune is a broken record if Puretracks ever shuts down its authentication servers.

Are you an impoverished college student who cannot afford new threads? No problem, Microsoft has a T-shirt for you for 1,100 tickets. It's yours for 24 days of searches plus those first 500 tickets. Need two T-shirts? That's just another 44 days of searching.

Oh, I can't help myself. For 4,300 tickets, Microsoft offers 2,500 frequent flyer miles. The American Airlines AAdvantage program delivers the tickets. Oh, but there's more! "American Airlines reserves the right to change the AAdvantage program at any time without notice." Thank you, Microsoft. Seeing as how the tickets can't be redeemed for prizes—eh, perks—until next April, American could change pretty much everything between now and then. And including those 500 big tickets, 152 days of searches are needed to get those frequent flyer miles.

OK, can someone explain why an Xbox 360 controller requires even more tickets than 2,500 frequent flyer miles? It's 5,500 tickets, or 200 days of searching plus the free 500 tickets.

Now for the fine print:

Please note, the prizes displayed here are representative of the types of prizes that are available for this promotion. Actual prizes may differ. Prizes are subject to availability at the time of redemption. Microsoft may change the number of tickets you must earn to receive a certain prize at any time. There may be a limited number of a particular prize; those prizes will be provided on a first-come first-served basis.

Something else: You have to commit to the promotion for the, ah, contest's duration or receive no tickets. Microsoft awards one ticket for every search done from Internet Explorer 6 or above or from the Windows Live, MSN or Live Search Web sites. The Perk Counter must be installed.

More fine print, about privacy: "The Perk Counter will not send any personal information or Web site addresses to Microsoft, and no information outside of the search data is included in the reports. The Perk Counter data will not be associated with other personal information Microsoft may have collected." The key phrase is "outside of the search data." That means Microsoft likely will be collecting data. Why should Google have all the demographic, data mining fun?

Surely that Perk Counter will collect search information. How could Microsoft not take advantage of such a tool?

Besides, if the Microsoft brainiacs are thinking hard, they'll use the search data to refine the prize list. SearchPerks is going to require committed people like my grandma—willing to lick those stamps and put them in books—to stick with the program until April 15. That's probably going to be a small subset of online users. I wonder what the makeup of that demographic group will be?

The question somebody is sure to ask: Will Microsoft's search share increase because of SearchPerks? Just ask the people laughing their asses off at Google.

[Please send your tips or rumors to watchtips at live.com.]